1hundredsixty8

 It was another of those interactions I stumble into online when I cannot restrain my inner Snark. I happened upon a Troll on Twitter berating David Axelrod and Chris Hayes who were involved in an exchange about basketball: “You guys should stick to talking sports. Just leave running this nation as-founded to we adults (R)”. Impulsively, I tweeted:

“"As founded"? Slavery, no voting for women- is that what you mean?”

Troll: ”BTW Einstein, it was Repubs who led in ending slavery & women's suffrage. D's opposed both.”

Me: “Not questioning who did what, was curious about connotation of "as founded".”

Troll: “As I said, limited gov't. We were founded to reject overbearing gov't as BO is imposing.”

I let it go at this point: Snark vs.Troll almost always plays to a draw. 

        The Troll was right about one thing, though: It was the Republican Party that presided over the end of slavery in this country. Where he was wrong was in not grasping how, in politics, roles and appellations often get interchanged and traditional positions can be subject to gross adjustments.

Lincoln’s Republican Party bears scant resemblance to the amalgam of varied interests that goes by the same name today. A century ago, during the Progressive Era, Republicans were more likely to be known as “Progressives” than Democrats. Theodore Roosevelt was the first “progressive President”, the trust-buster, and a leader in the conservation movement. Since the Republicans had presided over Reconstruction after the Civil War, the reaction of the South was to become solidly Democratic. It was these Dems who maintained a racially segregated society; poll taxes and literacy tests were precursors of the voter ID laws Republicans are now promulgating on the state level.

The dramatic shift in the composition of the parties in the last decades of the 20th Century occurred in part as a reaction to LBJ’s Great Society programs. As Kevin Phillips predicted in The Emerging Republican Majority (1968), the influx of blacks and Latinos into urban Democratic organizations drove the Irish, Italians and East Europeans, the traditional backbone of the Democratic machines, into the Republican Party. Coupled with the racially-charged “southern strategy”- an overt appeal to white voters- employed by Richard Nixon’s 1968 Presidential campaign, the movement of the urban working class and the solid South- previously allied to oppose “Yankee Republicans”- was underway in earnest. It is probably more appropriate to say that these groups moved away from the Democrats rather than towards the Republicans.

Consequently, then, what the parties choose to call themselves means little, but the policies they advocate, more. I have always been intrigued by the comparison of the domestic policy approaches of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, for instance. Arguably, Nixon, the Republican, was the more liberal of the two. Some actually refer to Nixon as the “last liberal President.” Their party affiliation is not at all indicative of their policy initiatives.

As the Bard wrote, "What’s in a name?"

We could re-name the two major parties the American and the National parties. We could call them the Lefts and the Rights, the Blues and the Reds. How about the Bulls and the Bears? Oh, I see… That’s taken. I got it: We can call them the Skins and the Shirts.

Perhaps, now that Supreme Court decisions that have provided a larger role for money in our political campaigns, we should name the parties after the donors: The Koch Party, the Soros Party, the Addelsons, the Steyers. At least then we’d know for sure what the candidate stood for.